In a conventional device driver, when a plurality of record partitions (hereinafter referred to simply as “partition”) are allocated on a recording medium (hereinafter referred to simply as “medium”) loaded in a removable device such as a DVD-RAM device, drive letters managed by an operating system are changed every time the medium is replaced if a replacement medium is allocated with a different number of partitions. That is, in the case of an operating system not capable of changing drive letters dynamically at each time the medium is replaced, it can not manage the drive letters with regard to partitions in each of the devices and a variety of other devices besides that device.
It is therefore necessary for both of the loaded medium and the replacement medium to have only one partition. Or, the computer system has had to be turned off once, when a medium having a number of partitions different from that of the loaded medium is replaced.
In other words, it has often been a common practice to use interchangeable media having one partition as described above, rather than dividing them with partitions, when the computer system is operated by the current operating system.
However, there has been a problem that it is not possible to read linked data, when a drive letter for the same device is changed every time the medium loaded in the removable device is replaced.
Moreover, there has been a demand in recent years for devices that do not require restarting of a computer system, when the devices are newly connected thereto. Such devices include those devices that conform to new standards such as the USB and the IEEE-1394. It is a retrogressive movement against the times, if a restart is needed every time a medium loaded in the removable device is replaced.
In addition, there has been advancement of recording media toward larger capacity, and DVD-RAM devices and the like are spreading widely for use with interchangeable media. When it becomes possible for one medium to record a large mass of data, storage areas (holder names) of the data, which have otherwise been stored in a plurality of media in the past, tend to overlap easily. Therefore, there has been a demand that data need to be arranged separately into divided partitions according to their categories.